Compiled with the help of folks living at the sharp end of a rapidly gentrifying neighbourhood, this guide hopes to let you swiftly identify the tell-tale words, phrases and signs that indicate your area is about to move ‘upmarket’.

Before you start spluttering the froth from your stretched piccolo latte into your fashionable waxed moustache, please note that not all of the individual things listed are necessarily bad or even outright proof of impending gentrification, but collectively they are likely indicators that the neighbourhood is ‘on the move’.

For decades now, the subculture has been moving into unsightly, dilapidated sections of many big cities, breathing new life into neighbourhoods. Artists and other creative professionals often form the vanguard of urban renewal. Ever on the lookout for cheap housing, studios and offices, they seize on rentals in areas that others are eager to flee as soon as they can.

For a long time it looked as though a close nexus had been forged between the sociocritical left-wing zeitgeist and the flowering of contemporary art. In cities like Frankfurt, Hamburg or Berlin, artists and otherwise creatively-involved occupants would defend their turf – often with plenty of wit and conviction – against frustrated town planners and unscrupulous developers. Many a neighbourhood in those cities has now become quite livable – thanks mostly to them. Since German reunification, however, the traditional politico-ideologically motivated squatter has, in many cases, been supplanted by artists and creative professionals of a personally ambitious caste.

Then the same metamorphosis almost invariably ensues – in Berlin, Hamburg or Cologne as in Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Barcelona, London, Warsaw or Prague: once artists and creators rent digs in a given neighbourhood, trendy cafés and restaurants follow in their wake. Before you know it, young men with five-day beards and young post-neo-something-or-other girlies in cool second-hand vintage clothes fiddle about on their laptops, planning new “projects”. The neighbourhood they have occupied is suddenly deemed “interesting”, small unconventional shops sprout up, then galleries and architects’ offices bring up the rear. Presently, the rents start rising.

The fact that a group of radical left-wing autonomists recently savaged an art gallery in Berlin goes to show how far the battle lines have shifted in the meantime. Nowadays many artists and creative folks are no longer deemed avant-garde rebels, but harbingers of gentrification and representatives of a new property-owning bourgeoisie. The conflict points up not only the vision of art espoused by the vandals, who apparently can only stand artists when they serve their ideological purposes; it also shows how much the relationship between art and political orientation has changed. The cool artists with designer glasses and hip outfits have long since forsaken their bourgeois-bashing stance and now seek to join the establishment. They were brought up in an age in which creative enterprise morphed into one of the fastest-growing industries around and art into a service industry for upscale investment.

Nowhere is the fusion of creative impetus and big business more conspicuous than here. The image of the artist as an unsociable misfit, a recluse on the fringes of society, is long since outmoded: successful artists are often as not the life of the party, smack in the middle of the action; like entrepreneurs, they engage in calculated networking, romp through art fairs the world over and fly as frequently as others take the bus.

In this metier, as in any other, only the usual happy few make it big. But their careers serve as a role model for a whole generation of epigones, who no longer conceive of art as the special case of a precarious professional trajectory, but as the fast lane to get way out in front of the pack.

So it is fitting that artists and creators should now be solicited by urban planners and investors. And that bears out US sociologist Richard Florida’s famous theory about the close connection between culture and economic growth, in which the cultural environment is the most decisive locational factor.

Such a monolithic image of the artist-enterpreneur is actually a cliché, however, that has little to do with the reality of most creative professionals. In cities like Hamburg, Cologne or Berlin, for instance, which take particular pride in their creative sector, most of the artists rank with the lower class in terms of average annual income. Often as not, they are among the first to find themselves unable to afford the rent hikes in what have become “in” neighbourhoods – even if they themselves helped trigger that development.

And so it is that, as harbingers of gentrification, artists and creators are among the losers of this rapid transformation, despite the widespread public perception of them as winners. This warped perception shows above all how the liberal Zeitgeist has succeeded in generating a hype that even radical autonomists are now prepared to buy.

your councillors claiming they want the area to become a ‘placeyplace’ (cf elephant & castle, 2013!); london farmers’ markets with chi-chi ‘local’ food from sussex which only the ‘right kind of local residents’ can afford to buy…

A – the constant use of the word “awesome”. These big framed glasses are awesome. these cup cakes are awesome.

F – fear of local state schools. for all the rich property owners in brixton, you won’t see many of their kids going to the local schools. “i’ll live in the same street as you, and it’ll make me feel all edgy and hip, but i don’t want my kids mixing with your kids”…you catch my drift…

Agree with quite a bit of this but surely the problem is high rents and high house prices, not ‘gentrification’ per se. I don’t neccesarily think it is a bad thing that city living is becoming more desirable to a wider mix of people.

One I noticed yesterday: Father clutching estate agent literature walking down Lambert Road with sheepish-looking son in tow, experiencing apparent difficulty locating an address. “What colour is the door?” pater enquired of junior.

@isvicthere? I’m certainly not saying urban re-vitalisation is a perfect solution. But the ‘old’ model of the 70s and 80s where the inner city was a place for the poor people, a ghetto where those who could left at sundown to your bolt-hole in suburbia or the countryside, that wasn’t exactly a sustainable model either.

Also interesting to note the original list bemoans ‘traditional street markets disappearing’ whilst also slagging off farmers markets as a sign of gentrification! Surely the traditional street markets *were* farmers markets, certainly up until WWII.

A really good sign of gentrification is infiltration of shallow professional, alcoholic, coked-up twats, who replace the unfriendly pre-gentrification twats who think they owned the area, and everyone else should stay out. London is becoming very very whiny. And hates children. Why? Because it’s already full of moronic adult children.